1. Field of Endeavor
The present invention relates to the field of vehicles. It relates to a rolling element for the polydirectional travel of a vehicle, and to a vehicle having such a rolling element.
2. Brief Description of the Related Art
In the manually-executed standard methods for non-destructive testing of components in the field of power plants, such as for example turbine blades, turbine housings or the like, ultrasound or electromagnetically operating sensors, a predefined sampling pattern must be adhered to or retraced. The person performing the testing holds the corresponding sensor by hand and moves it over that region of the component which is of interest. A typical sampling pattern runs in a meandering fashion over the region to be tested.
If that process is to be automated by a robot or scanner, there are presently two solutions: in one solution, use is made of a serially operating robot, for example in the form of a robot arm, to the free end of which the sensor is attached. In the other solution, a frame is placed onto the region to be tested, in which frame the sensor can be moved independently in two mutually orthogonal directions, in the manner of an X-Y plotter.
A serially operating robot is not only very cumbersome in terms of spatial requirement and equipment, but rather must also, for sampling, be set up for the spatial design of the object surface. In the case of a scanner, the frame must be matched to the object geometry in advance, which results in a very low degree of flexibility during use.